New Books in Philosophy (NBiP) is a podcast where philosophers are interviewed about their newly-published books. Each episode runs for roughly one hour, and for the past eight years hosts Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt University) have been posting one episode each every month. The first episodes were posted in the summer of 2011, with interviews with Eric Schwitzgebel about his Perplexities of Consciousness and Gerald Gaus about his The Order of Public Reason. Since its start, the podcast’s audience has been growing steadily. Currently, each episode receives over 8,000 downloads right after publication.
As of February of 2019, NBiP features two additional hosts: Alexus McLeod and Sarah Tyson. Alexus is a philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in non-Western philosophy. Sarah is a philosopher at University of Colorado at Denver specializing in continental philosophy and feminist philosophy. Now with four hosts producing episodes, NBiP will expand its coverage and breadth significantly. Moving forward, three episodes of the podcast will post each month: Figdor and Talisse will continue posting one interview each every month, and each of our new hosts will post one interview every other month.
NBiP is but one “channel” in the New Books Network of podcasts that is managed by editor-in-chief Marshall Poe. A specialist in Russian history, Marshall began his New Books in History podcast back in 2008. Shortly after launching his podcast, Marshall had the idea of creating a Network of podcasts, each focused on a different discipline. So Marshall reached out to Carrie with the idea of hosting the Philosophy channel of the Network. Carrie, who worked as a journalist before taking up her academic career, welcomed the invitation, but saw the need to pair with a co-host working within different subfields than her own (which are philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and aesthetics). She invited Robert Talisse, who she met while they were both PhD students at CUNY, to join her as a co-host; Robert specializes in social and political philosophy, ethics, pragmatism, and epistemology.
The format of the NBiP episodes is straightforward. We take our mission to be that of enabling authors to talk in depth about their new books. Accordingly, the interviews do not have the character of a book review or an “author meets critics” session. We aspire instead to prompt authors to present the central themes and ideas animating their work in a way that is accessible to a broad range of professional philosophers, academics from other disciplines, students, and non-academics, too. The overarching aim is to assist those who confront the “too many books, not enough time” problem to learn about what’s new in philosophy from the authors themselves. Conducting NBiP interviews is thus mostly a matter of facilitating a conversation.
Of course, there are many more excellent philosophy books published in a month than can be discussed on NBiP. Selection is inevitable. So we limit ourselves to interviews with authors of monographs (rather than edited volumes, collections of essays, or conference proceedings), with the aim of representing a rich spectrum of topics and styles. We also restrict ourselves to interviews about books that have published within the previous 12 months. Additionally, we seek to vary our interviews across the range of career-stages, presses, and institution kinds. Thus interviews with early assistant professors at smaller liberal arts colleges appear alongside episodes that feature senior members of the discipline working at elite departments. Interviews about books published with high-profile university presses such as Oxford and Cambridge appear alongside interviews with authors whose work has been published by excellent academic presses like Routledge and Rowman and Littlefield. In this way, NBiP helps bring attention to innovative and high-quality work that might otherwise escape notice. We welcome emails from authors of new philosophy books that express interest in being interviewed for the podcast.
For those who have not listened to NBiP, we recommend starting with the following episodes:
Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration
Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body
Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty
Alejandra Mancilla, The Right of Necessity
Susanna Siegel, The Rationality of Perception
Bart Struemer, Unbelievable Errors
Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful
Leif Wenar, Blood Oil
Robert Wilson, The Eugenic Mind Project
Charlotte Witt, The Metaphysics of Gender
Although NBiP mainly serves the profession internally as it were, we also hear regularly from students and non-academics who enjoy listening to the program. We see the podcast as a public initiative that makes professional philosophy more accessible and more easily shared outside of academic circles. We see this as a distinctive aspect of public philosophy. For many, public philosophy consists in activities designed to involve the public in philosophical reflection, often by having professional philosophers discuss and debate issues of public concern. This is an important and even crucial objective for the long-term health of the discipline. NBiP aspires to public outreach in a slightly different mode: it offers professional academic philosophy to a public audience who otherwise would not find it or even know how to look for it. This contributes to the long-term health of philosophy too, because it provides public access to a wide swatch of the newest research of professional philosophers. Philosophers know that philosophy covers much more than Socrates, but NBiP displays to the public how much more it includes.
All episodes of New Books in Philosophy can be streamed and downloaded at our NBN website.
One can follow New Books in Philosophy on Twitter at @NewBooksPhil and on Facebook at @NewBooksPhilosophy.
For those who are interested in podcasting, our only advice is to be prepared for the long haul. It takes time to prepare and record each podcast, and time to build an audience – and we are lucky in that we have a production team that takes care of everything except the interviews. Our reward is to be able to talk to so many wonderful philosophers, and to get feedback from listeners who tell us how much they appreciate this service.
Carrie Figdor
Carrie Figdor is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. She mainly works in philosophy of cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience, with a bit of social epistemology on the side. Her book, Pieces of Mind: The proper domain of psychological predicates (Oxford University Press), was published in 2018.
Robert Talisse
Robert Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He works centrally in political philosophy, with an emphasis in democratic theory. His latest book, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is titled Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place.
